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The Anker Nebula Cosmos Laser 4K is a room-to-room portable projector that looks like a tall car battery with a handle on top. It’s big, heavy, and bright for a portable projector, and it offers 4K (3,840-by-2,160-pixel) resolution. But in keeping with the heft, it costs a weighty $2,199.99. If you’re looking for a lighter weight and a lower price, the Epson EpiqVision Mini EF-12 is our current top choice for a room-to-room portable home entertainment projector. But know that it’s a different animal: It offers 1080p rather than 4K resolution, and it isn’t as bright. The Cosmos Laser 4K’s higher resolution and higher brightness makes it very much worth a look if you can budget for it. (And its handle makes it easier to carry.)
The Design: More Luggable Than Portable
Good-quality audio is an essential feature for a well-designed room-to-room portable projector. With it, you won’t feel the need to lug an external sound system with the projector every time you move to another room or to the backyard for a movie night. Most models in the category, including the 4K Xgimi Horizon Pro and the 1080p BenQ X1300i, make space for a proper audio solution by designing the case as a near cube. One exception is Anker’s 4K Nebula Cosmos Max, which uses a flat oval shape instead to add extra width.
The Cosmos Laser 4K is another exception. It offers a distinctly rectangular, rather than squarish, footprint, while adding extra height to accommodate the audio. At 10.7 pounds and 8.7 by 6.5 by 10.4 inches (HWD), the projector is more luggable than portable, but it’s easy to carry, thanks in large part to the handle, which is responsible for a little more than an inch of the height.
Beyond that, the auto-focus, auto-keystone, and auto-screen-fit features, all of which can be set to run automatically when you turn the projector on or move it, can help speed up ad hoc setup. Note, though, that the keystone and screen fit (which is effectively an automated digital zoom) are both better avoided, since they lower image brightness and can introduce artifacts. Also, the screen-fit feature didn’t work reliably in my tests, and Anker confirmed that how well it works depends on what’s in its field of view. However, the auto-focus worked well, delivering sharp focus and suitably fine detail.
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As with most DLP 4K projectors, the 3,840 by 2,160 pixels the Cosmos Laser 4K shoots on the screen are produced by a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel DLP chip using TI’s XPR fast-switch pixel shifting. The chip is paired with a laser-phosphor light source designed to last the life of the projector, and rated at 25,000 hours. (Anker doesn’t specify a power level for the rating, so the life may be somewhat shorter if you use full power.) The brightness rating is 2,400 ISO lumens (equivalent to ANSI lumens).
A major plus for Netflix users is that the projector offers a Netflix app that both works well for streaming and will take commands from the remote. Most competing Android TV-based models require extra steps to download a Netflix app, which typically requires control from your mobile device using a separate app. In many cases they also drop frames or have other issues for viewing.
Unlike most streaming room-to-room portables, the Cosmos Laser 4K comes with a separate Android TV dongle, which you have to insert in a hidden compartment. The process requires removing a panel, connecting two cables, and putting the panel back on. It’s not difficult, but it is a extra step.
Setup is otherwise standard fare. Put the projector in place, optionally connect a video source to its one HDMI port, turn it on, and set up the Android TV. There’s no optical zoom, which is typical for room-to-room portables. However, the projector is also more expensive than its competition, making the lack of optical zoom a bit less forgivable.
The menus could also use a better design. When calling up the menu, for example, the image dims and colors desaturate on the part of the image the menu’s not covering up, as if adding a gray filter. The result is that when you change picture modes, you can’t immediately see the effect on the image. Anker says this is inherent in the Android TV OS, but it might be addressed in a future firmware update. The long lag between calling up the menus and finally closing them makes it all but impossible to spot differences between relatively similar modes, much less tell which one, if either, gives you the better image overall.
The Cosmos Laser 4K’s audio system offers Dolby Audio, AiFi technology, a pair of 10-watt speakers for low-to-mid frequencies, and a pair of 5-watt speakers for high frequencies. All of them together deliver usable sound at high enough volume for a large family room. You can also connect an external audio system using the 3.5mm stereo audio out port, or connect to a Bluetooth speaker. However, there’s no audio lag adjustment, which makes the Bluetooth connection best avoided. Note that the projector also offers a Bluetooth speaker mode to use with other audio sources.
Testing the Cosmos: Decent Color Accuracy (But No Settings to Improve It)
The Cosmos Laser 4K menus offer five predefined modes that you can’t adjust at all, and one Custom mode that lets you change contrast, saturation, sharpness, color temperature, and gamma, but nothing else. Notably missing is any way to adjust primary and secondary colors to improve color accuracy.
As with the lack of an optical zoom, this is typical in this category of projector, but disappointing for the price. The good news is that most people would consider the colors in all modes acceptable or better straight out of the box, and even those with a trained eye will probably consider them acceptable for casual viewing.
For my viewing tests, I chose Movie mode, which delivered both the best color accuracy and the best balance of color, contrast, and shadow detail. In my tests using 1080p SDR movies on disc in a dark room, it delivered nicely saturated color along with good contrast and sense of depth in brightly light scenes. Blacks weren’t dark enough to give good contrast in darker scenes, which lead to muddy-looking images. However, shadow detail held well enough so I could easily make out what was happening. In moderate ambient light, the image lost a little contrast, but it still held up well, even for dark scenes.
Viewing the 4K HDR versions of the same movies on disc was disappointing. The Cosmos Laser 4K lacks a setting for a feature usually labeled as HDR Brightness, which is needed because the HDR10 standard allows enough variation that the best setting can vary from one movie or video source to another. As with the lack of both optical zoom and color management, this is typical for room-to-room portables, but less forgivable at the Cosmos Laser 4K’s price.
For the movies in our test suite, brightly lit scenes held up well enough, but they were dim in comparison to the 1080p SDR versions. They also had lower contrast and lost significantly more shadow detail even in a dark room. With lights on, the image was washed out enough that I couldn’t see much of anything in the darkest areas of dark scenes.
For 3D, the Cosmos Laser 4K works with DLP-Link glasses, but it supports only side-by-side and under-over formats, and it requires manually switching to and from 3D. I saw no crosstalk in my tests, and only the typical level of 3D-related motion artifacts for current-generation projectors.
Gamers, meanwhile, will note a Game mode with two different settings to minimize input lag, which Anker rates at 40ms for the setting with the shorter lag. I measured both settings with a Leo Bodnar meter at a slightly higher 59ms for both 1080p 60Hz and 4K 60Hz, which is still suitable for casual gaming only.
In both 1080p SDR and 4K HDR viewing, I saw more rainbow artifacts (red-green-blue flashes) than with most DLP projectors today. If you don’t see them as easily as I do or don’t find them annoying, this won’t be a problem. But if you’re concerned it might be, you can test the projector yourself. Anker accepts returns for any reason within 30 days of purchase, although you’ll have to pay for the return shipping.
Anker rates the Cosmos Laser 4K at 2,400 ISO lumens (which is comparable to ANSI lumen ratings for most purposes). However, for the Movie mode I used in my tests, the image brightness was close to what I expect from about 1,450 lumens. For SDR material, the projector was easily bright enough to fill a 100-inch 1.0 gain screen in a dark room, and the image was still quite watchable with the level of ambient light typical for a family room at night. It was also watchable, but washed out, on an 80-inch screen on a bright afternoon. For HDR material, the image was acceptably bright at the 100-inch size in a dark room, but dark scenes were washed out even in low levels of ambient light.
The Verdict: A Little Pricey, But Worth Considering
On a strictly bang-for-the-buck basis, the Anker Nebula Cosmos Laser 4K doesn’t score as well as the Xgimi Horizon Pro. Using the settings I chose for each, it puts out more brightness than the Horizon Pro to notice, and I saw fewer, and less obvious, rainbow artifacts, while the Horizon Pro does a bit better with HDR and costs about $500 less at this writing. Whether the Cosmos Laser 4K is worth the higher price depends in large part on whether you need the slightly higher brightness and how easily you see rainbow artifacts.
Keep in mind, also, that if most of what you watch is in 1080p SDR format, you can save even more by considering 1080p models instead, particularly the BenQ X1300i, the Xgimi Horizon, or the Epson EF-12. Among them, the Horizon and EF-12 are designed mostly for home entertainment, while the X1300i adds features of most interest to gamers. The EF-12 isn’t quite as bright as either, but it has the advantage of being guaranteed free of rainbow artifacts. That said, if you want the brightest portable 4K projector on the block, the Anker Nebula Cosmos Laser 4K is it.
3.5
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The Anker Nebula Cosmos Laser 4K is heavier than most room-to-room-to-backyard portable projectors, but its easy-carry handle and 4K resolution make it worth a look.
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Source link : https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/anker-nebula-cosmos-laser-4k